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saved by the Matrix
Friday, July 6 2001
This morning bright and early, before sunrise, I was cleaning out the basement. I'd take something bulky like an alley-picked surfboard, an inoperable bicycle or a big piece of wood and take carry it about 300 feet from my condo (in any of the compass directions) and then just deposit it. I left stuff to the north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west and northwest and points in between. By the time I left for work this morning the basement was pretty clean. I'd recycled four gallons of used motor oil (most of it John's) yesterday. My Punch Buggy Rust is now lubricated with Mobile One, the fanciest oil money can buy.
Cruising around trying to find a spark plug socket (one that my socket wrench can drive) occupied much of my time after work. I'd bought a socket yesterday, but it had one of those massive drive holes in it, utterly incompatible with my socket wrench. I went east down Wilshire hoping to find a store that sells tool type things, but all the commercial establishments on Wilshire cater to the smartly-dressed urban professional, not the would-be grease monkey such as myself. I saw a couple of hot chicks in little black minidresses stepping towards Q's and suddenly felt really left out. When I'm not drinking and partying on a Friday night I usually feel like the world is passing me by, and it hurts in a way not too different from heartbreak. I tell people this and they usually think I'm crazy, but my old girlfriend Christin reported the same feelings.
I ended up at OSH Hardware on Bundy and Olympic. While there, I went looking for a replacement knob for one of the dimmers in my condo. What a scam! The entire mechanism, complete with rheostat, is $3. The knob, a simple single piece of plastic, is $2. This was such a grave injustice I shoplifted the damn thing. It turned out that it was incompatible with my dimmer anyway, though I was able to make it work by reaming it out with a pair of scissors.
Now that I had a usable spark plug socket from OSH Hardware I was able to replace one of my most problematic spark plugs. This seemed to improve the performance of my engine drastically, but later I determined it hadn't really helped (there's a difference between idle and load). The persistent misfiring problem still seems to mostly be the result of shitty spark plug wires.
Later on I did the online chat thing with various ThreeWayAction people via a version of telnet. I was drinking vodkatea at the time and was not totally clear headed when Sara Astruc invited me off to a separate chat system. It was like being in the Matrix, where the ringing of a phone can jettison one into a completely different universe, one where the old rules simply do not apply. There I was in this private chat with Astruc and Fandango Matt, but the oddest thing of all was that I felt like I was hanging out with them in some college dorm room, one where I ultimately become the third wheel in the evening's adventures. This semi-depressing outcome was happily thwarted by a crash of the chat server. Saved by the Matrix!
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